A Study On Metaphor In Catchwords From The Perspective Of Memetics

The study of metaphor has experienced a long historical period,which can be traced back to Aristotle’s age.Until now it remains a fresh research topic.The study of metaphor has gone through different stages,from rhetoric,semantics and pragmatics to cognitive linguistics.Although the study of metaphor has achieved a lot in the previous researches in linguistics,few studies of metaphor have introduced metaphor to dynamic linguistics to explore the law of the replication and transmission of metaphor.“Meme”is a new concept which was proposed by the famous behavioral ecologist Dawkins in the mid and late 20^{t h} century.Then Blackmore and other scholars develop the theory of meme and establish the basic theoretical framework of memetics.Memetics is a new theory which is based on Darwin’s evolution theory to explain the laws of the evolution and development of the social culture.With the development of memetics,its application is gradually extended,and it becomes a new way to explain various linguis t ic phenomena.Therefore,this paper aims to study metaphor from the memetic perspective,and it is supported by the linguistic data.This study mainly uses the methodology of qualitative analysis and instance analysis.From the perspective of memetics,this paper is to define memetic metaphor and analyze its features,exploring the working mechanism of replication and transmission of the memetic metaphor,explaining the ways of replicatio n and transmission of memetic metaphor,genotype and phenotype,discussing the features and transformation mechanism of the strong and weak memetic metaphor.This paper mainly chooses catchwords from the natural linguistic data as instance analysis and analyzes categories,causes of generation mechanism and functions of the memetic metaphor in catchwords.From the cognitive aspect,the memetic metaphors in catchwords are divided into orientational memetic metaphor,ontological memetic metaphor and structural memetic metaphor.The cause of the generation mechanism is discussed from three aspects:economy principle,cognitive motivation,psychological element.The function of the memetic metaphor mainly includes decoration,creativity and novelty,pragmatic effect:humor and satire.Exploring metaphor from the memetic perspective,this paper is expected to obtain some new and creative discoveries,which is beneficial to the future study of memetic metaphor.Meanwhile,the present study can offer a new approach to analyzing the metaphor,which will push the research of metaphor forward and expand the applicatio n of memetics.